Desire motivates us in many important ways: physical desire, for example, is called hunger or thirst; intellectual desire is called curiosity; sexual desire is called lust; economic desire is called consumer demand.
According to ancient wisdom, the four aims of life: purpose, prosperity, pleasure and freedom provide the roadmap to achieving your most fulfilling, joyful and meaningful life. Achieving all four of these desires is the key to lasting happiness.
The first and most overriding of the four desires is dharma, the longing for purpose, the drive to be and to become who you are meant to be. Dharma, in simple terms, is the drive to fulfill your potential; it is the inherent drive of every being to thrive.
Practice description
Therefore, if you find fulfillment at one level of the four desires— dharma (purposeful), artha (material), kama (pleasurable), or moksha (spiritual)—it has an impact on all the other desires and your entire life.
The Four Desires Approach to Self-Inquiry:
The Four Desires will unleash your vision and power to thrive, show you how to tap into the power of your soul and guide you to become who you were meant to be, the place where worldly and spiritual prosperity meet.”
Buddha said very clearly that humans have five main desires: food, sleep, sex, money, fame.
In the end, the researchers identified 16 basic desires that we all share: acceptance, curiosity, eating, family, honor, idealism, independence, order, physical activity, power, romance, saving, social contact, status, tranquility and vengeance.
As you probably know, once we have food and shelter, but before we can seek self-actualization—the Smart State—we must feel safety, belonging and mattering. Without these three essential keys a person cannot get in their Smart State—they cannot perform, innovate, feel emotionally engaged, agree, move forward.
The desires are power, independence, curiosity, acceptance, order, saving, honor, idealism, social contact, family, status, vengeance, romance, eating, physical exercise, and tranquility. "These desires are what drive our everyday actions and make us who we are," Reiss said.
Human beings are born with eight primal needs—needs that are programmed by DNA into the subconscious—and are essential for survival. These eight primal needs are acceptance, connectedness, contentment, freedom, gratification, guardianship, prestige, and survival.
There are so many types of desire working together to drive us through life: Physical desire is hunger and thirst; intellectual desire is curiosity, the need to acquire knowledge; sexual desire is lust and economic desire is the need for power and possession of materials.
Your soul desires are your deepest longings in this lifetime. They don't easily change. They come along with your unique talents and skills that you innately offer to the rest of the human collective. They are a major and overarching driving force behind all of the mundane decisions of your life.
The term “six desires” first appeared in Master Lü's Spring and Autumn Annals, referring to human desire for life, desire against death, and the desires of human organs such as ears, eyes, mouth and nose for sound, color, taste and aroma.
Sex desire is the most powerful of human desires. When driven by this desire, men develop keenness of imagination, courage, willpower, persistence, and creative ability unknown to them at other times.
The Vedas teach that there are four types of desires: artha, kama, dharma, and moksha.
Seven Desires explores the common desires God has given us--to be heard, affirmed, blessed, safe, touched, chosen, and included.
“The deepest desire of every human heart is to be known and to be loved,” Father Joe Campbell said in a Feast of St. Joseph the Worker homily Saturday. “This desire reaches its fullness in the desire to be known by God Himself.”
The desire to be loved back, to be adored, appreciated, to be recognized, to be accepted by someone, the desire to just belong somewhere, to someone, is one of the strongest.
Through extensive research, the author has found the following desires (in no specific order): Power, Independence, Curiosity, Acceptance, Order, Saving, Honour, Idealism, Social Contact, Family, Vengeance, Romance, Eating, Physical activity and Tranquillity.
Maslow's theory was that people progress through five general stages in the pursuit of what they want: physiology, safety, belongingness/love, esteem, and self-actualization.
Desires that are natural such as the desire for food when hungry or the desire for water when thirsty. And there are desires born of our opinion: we will be happy if we have so much money, such and such position, so many friends, so much sex, and so on.
Writing in a new book The 16 Strivings for God, he says religions instead address all 16 of the basic human desires at once - curiosity, acceptance, family, honor, idealism, independence, order, physical activity, power, romance, saving, social contact, eating, status, tranquility and vengeance.
Desires are most naturally caused by bodily changes or physiological conditions. Desires for food, drink, sleep and sex are triggered by bodily changes. It seems clear that we have no voluntary control over whether we form such a desire, or whether they come into existence. Belief also causes desire.